Ernestina Herrera de Noble, Media Mogul in Argentina, Dies at 92

Ernestina Laura Herrera de Noble, the publisher of Argentina’s largest-circulation daily, Clarín, who was instrumental in turning her husband’s newspaper into one of the largest media conglomerates in the Spanish-speaking world, died on Wednesday in Buenos Aires. She was 92.

Ms. Herrera de Noble, a former flamenco dancer with no business experience, became an unlikely player in the country’s media landscape when she took over Clarín, a tabloid, in 1969 after the death of her husband, Roberto Noble, who founded it in 1945.

Under her leadership, Clarín — the word is Spanish for bugle — solidified its position as the country’s most widely read daily newspaper.

Alongside a group of close advisers, including the current chief executive, Héctor Magnetto, Ms. Herrera de Noble led an effort to diversify the business, buying newspapers, radio stations and, as it grew into the nation’s largest cable television and internet service provider, websites. Most recently, the company bought the local subsidiary of Nextel in a bid to enter the mobile market.

She “has long been underestimated because she was always presented as Noble’s widow,’’ said Martín Sivak, a journalist who wrote a book about Clarín that will be published in the United States next year. “Even though she was not a journalist by trade, I think she had instincts and a sensibility that have not been recognized.”

He added, however, that the company’s growth stemmed largely from “its enormous power to lobby and pressure” the government for favorable regulations.

Shortly after Ms. Herrera de Noble’s death, President Mauricio Macri of Argentina said on Twitter that she was a “key figure in journalism and the defense of press freedom.”

Relations between the government and Clarín’s leadership were not always friendly. Mr. Macri’s predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, engaged in a long battle against the company when the paper criticized an increase in farm taxes shortly after she took office in December 2007.

Mrs. Kirchner sponsored an antitrust law that would have forced Clarín to break itself up into smaller companies. Her government also pushed fresh investigations into the company’s behavior during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, from 1976 to 1983, when almost all news outlets stayed silent about the killing of as many as 30,000 people.

A case was opened over Clarín’s 1976 purchase, with two other newspapers, of the country’s main newsprint manufacturer, Papel Prensa. Mrs. Kirchner’s government charged that the firm was sold at a fire-sale price with the help of threats and kidnappings by the military junta. Three weeks before Ms. Herrera de Noble’s death, an appeals court confirmed a lower-court ruling dismissing the case.